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There was a post I can't find that said that there was this big google update on Sept 22nd and everyone who is an affiliate site has lost his placement. That update was called Jaggar. A bunch of us panicked because we got wiped out. (I created 53 new websites in 5 days because of it, it worked because these new websites had better placement now than my established site) The advice was just to be patient and it would return to normal.

I posted in late October I think, I didn't mind google making changes, but not a few months before xmas when there was not enough time to do anything about it.

Well here it is December 27th and I check my stats and my hits are up. They had been down from Sept 22nd on. So I check google and my placement is back. Its the same as it was before September 22nd. Top 10 placement on all of my major keywords. Google cost me thousands of dollars and in the end ended up exactly where it started. (Well I suppose i'm not where I started I now have another 50+ websites to maintain)

Well I had finally found out about jaggar 5 days before I was going on vacation to las vegas. I knew something was wrong in september, but I didn't find out its name until then. It was speculated that google was devaluing affiliate sites, so I created sites that had no affiliate links. They just connected to the pages that had affiliate links on my other site.

I created all the sites listed here http://www.dogbreedgift.net in those last 4 days before I was about to leave. Ask rhea, she can vouch that all of those sites was created in those 4 days. I really haven't changed them since.

It was a good concept, I called the sites the dog breed gift network and each site contained gifts from a different breed of dog. I came up with the concept when I realized that whereas there was people squating and a say chihuahuagifts.com for all the breeds, they didn't think to squat on chihuahuagifts.net and I could get them all (well 53 of them) for $6.75 a domain name.

Each site has only 2 to 5 pages, but they all have at least 50 outbound links to my affiliate pages on the other site. The cool thing about it was that within a few days most had a better placement than the original site. Usually in the 20s for the keywords they was created for. i.e. http://www.chihuahuagifts.net was about 22 for the term chihuahua gifts. Now its still 22 under that term but my original site is back to the top 10.

Well here it is December 27th and I check my stats and my hits are up. They had been down from Sept 22nd on. So I check google and my placement is back. Its the same as it was before September 22nd. Top 10 placement on all of my major keywords. Google cost me thousands of dollars and in the end ended up exactly where it started. (Well I suppose i'm not where I started I now have another 50+ websites to maintain)

Pity it was 5 weeks too late to save my xmas.

Mike

Just like you (and many others) I also lost all my Google rankings with the September upgrade but, since yesterday, it is back with a vengeance. My traffic is sky high again, and my rankings for specific keywords are back to where they were before. I just hope this is not a flash-in-the-pan and that tomorrow I will wake up to find my pages have disappeared off the radar again . I don't think it has anything to do with your extra 50+ new sites linking to your affiliate site. This has happened to me twice and both times it took about 4 months for my Google traffic to come back. When this happens it's best not to panic and start producing more sites, but rather to be patient. As you say... pity it was too late to save Xmas sales.

NO you misinterpret what I meant. The new sites has nothing to do with it. What I am saying is the jaggar didn't exist. Not in the sense of google making a permanent change that says "affiliate sites are no good" Everything is exactly as it was. Every year for no reason for several weeks (6-8-10) my placement is just gone. Last year and the year before it was in April or May so I chalked it up to other things. This year it just happened to be in September. And it cost me a huge percentage of my yearly sales.

I now expect this to happen every year for several weeks. I hope next year it'll be in June not October. I'm never going to believe again that google hates affiliate sites, that isn't true or my ranking wouldn't have returned. My plan is to develop the new small sites separately from my main site so when google kiulls my main site, the small sites will make up for the slack.

I suppose what I am saying is that now I know this is going to happen, I'll plan for it and expect it and won't panic. It's not something I did, its not that google made a huge PERMANENT change in its algorithm, its not because my site was down for a few hours at a 'key time'. I'll know that eventually everything will return to normal and I'll just have to wait for it

OK I get it now. Guess I did misread your post - I thought what you meant was that by linking all your "doggy" sites to your main site was the reason you got your rankings back. Anyway so far so good... it seems the Big G is planning on staying for a while (don't know for how long!), so we had better strike while the iron is hot. Oh, by the way, good luck with the dog gifts.

There was a change with Jagger, though not everyone experienced it. Some sites popped out and started ranking and pulling Google traffic for the first time, apparently because some filters were loosened up that were keeping them from ranking before.